People & Inspiration

Daily Diaries: From Mix Tape To Spotify Playlist—How Millennials Use Music To Confess Their Feelings

Ever since, people have been using songs to confess their feelings. The only difference from the way people confessed then and now is the medium of the message. Back then, people painstakingly recorded mix tapes for their special person, but with the dawn of technology, Spotify (or other streamng sites for that matter) is all we need.

We are the generation of glasses and circuits. Masters of keeping our heads down, absorbed by the world in our hands. This is us, the generation of smart phones and feelings. Mix tapes are distant memories, Spotify playlists are the now.

Confessing and baring your soul—being truly naked— is part and parcel of life, being human, and having feelings. You may be afraid but that's normal—you're handing your heart to someone and you're scared of getting hurt in the process. But somehow, confessing online, through a music app makes things much, much easier. It seems that the screens between us make for masks that hide our faces and help us be braver than usual—a shield that protects our emotions. What we don't realize is that by doing this, we are not only confessing to one person but to the world. But why is it so easy to convey our feelings through songs and playlists? Let's decipher:

Songs can be used as our mouthpiece. It's always been convenient to express what we feel using the words of others. There are songs you'll listen to that seemingly verbalize everything we want to say. We use songs when we're too afraid to say what we feel straight to others' faces, and we can only hope that they are able to understand what our own words can't say.

Songs are the windows to our heart. If our eyes are the windows to our souls, our taste in music and even the lyrics to the songs we listen offer a preview of what our heart is saying. There are even times when we ourselves don't know the obvious [i.e. that we're already in love?], and songs are powerful enough to reveal those that we don't want to admit (to others and to ourselves).

Songs as our current feelings. There are lyrics that we use as a one-liner to give a compliment, or sometimes what our subconscious really wants to say, to that person we're pining for. Flattering someone through a song? So extra.

Song titles are our love letters. A teenage girl named Hannah became a trending topic on Twitter after she used Spotify's playlist feature to make some sort of a love letter/confession to her crush. (You go girl!) Luckily, her crush felt the same.

Songs can be a scapegoat from rejection. We confess through songs because there's a possibility that the person we like doesn't like us back, or don't understand the message we're trying to send. We use songs to confess because in reality, we are scared of an actual, in-your-face rejection. We don't want the words coming from our own mouth, words we wrote, words we tried so hard verbalizing getting flushed down the drain by hearing him or her say "no". If they don't get our hidden meaning, we can just tell them, "It's just a song," or "It's just a silly playlist." But in reality that is your heart on your sleeve that they're slowly breaking.

Songs can make you hope for your own Happy Ever After. But if the confession is a success, like Hannah's story, you can get your own happy ending. All you need is to be brave, be a little direct, and have a "fuck it" attittude. Maybe you'll even listen to that playlist in the future together, as a couple!